“It makes me so sad and you so happy, Joe,” Carville said later. “God closes one door for Michelle Bachmann and opens three to Louie Gohmert. Everybody in a political party feels some sense of: ‘God, why can’t these people just shut up?’ We have many of them in the Democratic party that I’m not going to name right now, but I do think there are a lot of Republicans that are going to be relieved that some of these fringe people decide to pursue a speaking career.”

Bachmann, a tea party star who delivered a response to the State of the Union and won the Ames Straw Poll in 2011, was a prolific fundraiser — both for her own campaigns and for Democrats, who made her inflammatory comments the star of fundraising pitches. The Minnesota Republican announced her retirement early Wednesday, saying that this term in Congress, her fourth, would be her last.